Black letter experimentation

Experimenting with drawing ink and black paint, we looked into emulating the typical black letter style, to do so I had to teach myself to move my hand in a more mechanical fashion which I found difficult at first as I'm used to having a more free flowing style. This approach however relies on straight calculated lines, as well as a specific amount of ink for hand rendered approaches. Black letter typically includes contrasting variations of densely thick and narrow strokes, with angles serifs and decorative additions. 

Calligraphy Black letter

Coop Black letter

 and  I'd also consider myself usually to be quite messy in terms of the outcome of my work, leaning towards more chaotic visuals. These first examples I feel show my initial struggle: 

After studying more examples and through trial and error I feel I reached a point whereby my line making appeared much more like black letter. Playing around with composition, we were instructed to include 5 emulations of arrows, as well as 5 other pictograms.

 Here being 2 examples of the pictograms I created out of shapes I'd made. Below is an exit and parking sign. I like the outcome of particularly the first thanks to it's ambiguity. The aim of this process was to deconstruct visually and literally the idea of an objective sign system and turn it into something subjective and visually less obviously coherent.

 After this initial hand rendered exploration, we took the pictograms and vectorised them in Illustrator, I feel the outcome of these was more polished yet I liked the specks and imperfections captured by the image tracer so I kept these.